Whatever had been in the drawers of the desk and the cabinet behind one of the desk, well, the burglars had clearly made off with all of that.
In the middle of the night. With police escort.
If you could call Kaplan a police escort.
That part wasn’t in the papers, of course. And the neighbors never seemed to notice the two police officers—one tiny and dark, and the other who looked like he was from central casting. They arrived at one a.m. on two consecutive nights, parked in the driveway, and carried boxes of documents out to a squad car.
No one questioned it, no one remembered it, and no one even knew about those rooms for nearly two months after the investigation closed, when the heirs—the administrators of seven local charities—got their first tours of the place they had now held in trust.
Then the story broke open again.
By then, no one even mentioned the cops dealing with that late-night crime scene. No one mentioned the boxes.
Boxes that moved from one secret room to another—although my room wasn’t exactly secret: just forgotten. It was the closet off what had been the choir room. There were even a few musty robes balled up in the corner. I didn’t move them. I just locked the closet door, then locked the choir room door, and wondered what I would do with my treasure, what I would do with another woman’s life work.
Kaplan asked me not to worry about it, not yet.
I didn’t worry about it, but I decided it was time to join the female half of the human race. I signed up for a shorthand course at Madison Area Technical College, starting in January.
And that would have been the end of it, except for one rather strange conversation, late on a Saturday night, two weeks after Langham’s death.
I found myself alone with Helene, our second oldest volunteer, the one who irritated me, the one who had given Dolly Langham her nickname.
That night, Helene wore a blue dress over a girdle that had to hurt like hell, her perfect stockings attached at the thigh with clips that she would have been appalled to know I had seen as she sat down. She had played the organ at Langham’s funeral, and stood graveside like a supplicant.
I had pretended I hadn’t seen her.
But that night, in the silence of the phone room, about eleven p.m. when Langham’s drunken calls usually came in, I said, “You knew who it was from that first call, didn’t you?”
I watched Helene weigh her response. An old secret versus a new one, the sadness at the loss of a friend, the weight we both felt in the silence.
After a long moment, she nodded.
“You knew what she had been doing all these years too, didn’t you?” I asked.
“The charities? Of course,” Helene said.
“The writing,” I said.”
Helene peered at me. Then sighed. “I thought she had quit decades ago. I would have told her to quit if I had known.”
So Helene suspected the truth: that Langham’s death was caused by her work, not by burglars.
“Who hurt her so badly?” I asked.